Blackstar and Narcogen talk to Cody Miller of HaloReach.IsNotCanon.Net about his experience with the Destiny Alpha last week. In this segment we cover the sandbox-like Exploration play mode in Old Russia.

Cody Miller of HaloReachIsNotCanon.Net played the Destiny Alpha on PS4 last week and came on to talk about the footage with Blackstar and Narcogen. In this first segment we cover three areas of the game: character creation, a story mission, and the Tower.

Further segments later this week will show exploration, multiplayer, and a strike.

Jason Jones tells you everything you need to know about Destiny (almost) while also showing off a few new character designs, environments, enemies, and map locations. There's a shot of a Venus map, and a location in the overview map called "the reef" which I'm guessing is the asteroid belt.

A good mix of both gameplay and some additional story in Bungie's "New Beginnings" trailer for E3 2014.

Also the first time I think I've seen it explicitly stated (by Peter Dinklage's voiceover here) what I've suspected for awhile here-- that the Traveler was the cause of both humanity's lost golden age and its downfall, and the enemies we face are the enemies of the Traveler, not necessarily the enemies of humanity.

Still, that might not ever become relevant, but it is something I've been thinking about for awhile.

...at least that's what Bungie's lead investment designer on Destiny, Tyson "Ferrex" Green, is counting on. Watch this GameInformer interview to see him talk about what Bungie has learned from other games and where they are striking out on their own.

For years now I've speculated that Bungie became independent from Microsoft in 2007 because the studio wanted to make games that weren't Halo but Microsoft wanted no part of that. This conclusion seemed (to me, anyway) to be strongly supported by the spinoff deal that set Bungie free in exchange (at least in part) for Microsoft keeping the Halo franchise. Any lingering doubts I'd suggest were expunged by Jason Jones in his last interview with Game Informer:

GI: Before Destiny, your team had been working on Halo for a long time. What prompted the move?

JJ: You already answered your own question.

There you have it. Incidentally, the interview has some other good information about Destiny, the difference between story and world-building, and other stuff. I'm waiting to see if they ask him about whether Destiny will have a Body Count... I mean, Slayer mode.